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My Dog Got Me Through My Trauma
For every pet owner, there’s one animal against whom all others are measured. For me, it was my dog Abercrombie. Then we got Brian.
Abercrombie was a black lab mix puppy my dad brought home after he saw a note posted on the bulletin board at the Pentagon where he worked. We’d always had black lab mutts in our family, their fates a sad mix of heartbreak. Smokey, the dog my parents had when I was born, who I was told marched to the beat of polka music, escaped our yard one day and was shot in the heart with a tranquilizer dart because the animal control person called to the scene perceived him as rabid.
We briefly had one dog whose name I don’t even remember because she had been abused and every time my dad walked into the room she’d roll over on her back and pee so she had to go live somewhere else.
Ebenezer was our black lab mutt in Texas who we got from the SPCA after he followed some kid home whose family didn’t want any more pets. Ebenezer loved to swim in our back yard pool and he once defended my brother and I from a Cotton Mouth snake that had made its way into our playroom to give birth.
When my dad got called back to active duty for the Navy, we got orders to move to Spain and we had to give Ebenezer away to a man who…
